One year I bought sweet potato slips — expensive! and when they arrived, the supplier had substituted one of the varieties. These things happen, but highly disappointing to have wasted time and thought poring over detailed descriptions and requirements to determine the exact ones I wanted. (Not to mention overcoming my resistance to any spending on plants.) The variety I had rejected and they selected does seem to do all right here, not super prolific but I like them. Nevertheless, the experience made me leery of being at the mercy of someone else’s weather as well as our own.
Since then I’ve started my own slips with last year’s potatoes in water, with varying productivity both in the glasses and once planted. It’s easy and works well enough, generally, but last year it seemed to take forever for the shoots to start and I have the impression this perceived lag also led to fewer potatoes even from the slips ready to be planted when it was time, and a less impressive haul from those I could get in the ground only later.
I decided the kitchen window may lack adequate warmth and sunshine in Jan-Feb, so this year I set up mats and lights elsewhere and got several going. About a week later, I was reading (not for the first time) that the whole water thing wasn’t necessary.1 Having run across a few more potatoes in the stash that seemed to be starting to consider sprouting, it was easy to set them up for a test, with nothing to lose.
Granted that these were already a bit more poised to sprout, the difference just three weeks later is much more dramatic than I expected. One of the water starts was not looking healthy underwater and is not shown. The other three with a week’s head start looked like this:
So far so good. By contrast, however, the ones plopped on their side have healthy slips now ready to pluck. This was a few days ago:
It’s a bit different underneath, where the water method has encouraged lots of roots, but note the difference between the first two (smallish, on the heating mat) and the last (fat and closest to the light source):
On the other hand, look up close at the slips from the side plopped bunch in a picture taken less than three days after the picture above:
For me, the trickiest part of the water method has been carefully prying loose the eventual shoots, which typically have no roots (no matter how tall they get) and only sometimes, if close to the water, a few of those thin and fragile roots shown in water-method potatoes above. These roots from the plopped method are entirely different; early and consistent, more substantial, aggressive, and prolific both near the potato itself and climbing up the shoot. These are miles ahead for future planting.
Unless something goes horribly wrong in the next steps, as it very well could, I think that’s the end of potatoes in jars for me.
As an aside, we took our 20# hams out of the salt box yesterday to start their hanging phase. Every year we think of a few more tweaks to make the process a little smoother.
It was on the site preceding her Substack, and a nice, comprehensive write-up: https://practicalselfreliance.com/sweet-potato-slips/